Where It All Started
Welcome to Ann Arbor.
America's cannabis origin city. Home of the Hash Bash since 1972. The first American city to decriminalize marijuana — and still the city where the conversation runs deepest fifty-four years later.
The Origin Story
Cannabis's American conversation started here.
In 1969, an Ann Arbor poet and activist named John Sinclair was sentenced to ten years in prison for possession of two marijuana joints. Two joints. Ten years. The sentence was so outrageous that Abbie Hoffman interrupted The Who's set at Woodstock to publicly protest it.
On December 10, 1971, Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg organized a Free John Sinclair rally at the University of Michigan's Crisler Arena. They pulled in friends: John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, Phil Ochs, Commander Cody. Lennon wrote a new song for the occasion — just called “John Sinclair.” Thousands smoked cannabis openly inside Crisler Arena that night as an act of civil disobedience. Three days later, the Michigan Supreme Court freed Sinclair and ruled the state's marijuana statutes unconstitutional.
On April 1, 1972, during a brief window when no Michigan cannabis law was on the books, activists held the first Hash Bash on the University of Michigan Diag. A few months later, Ann Arbor's City Council reduced the penalty for possession to a $5 civil infraction — the most lenient local cannabis law in the United States. In 1974, voters enshrined that ordinance in the city charter so no future council could undo it.
Graham Nash called out Ann Arbor by name in his 1974 song “Prison Song.” The Hash Bash is now in its fifty-fourth consecutive year. And Ann Arbor has the most recreational cannabis licenses of any city in Michigan. This is a city that has been having the cannabis conversation since before almost anyone else — and it has never stopped.
When you shop cannabis in Ann Arbor, you're shopping in the city that made it possible for the rest of America to catch up.
This Week's Spotlight Dispensary
Featured Pick of the Week
Information Entropy
SpotlightAnn Arbor's own. Family-owned, seed-to-sale, and housed in a former First Baptist church on Broadway Street.
Founder Drew Hutton nearly lost Information Entropy during COVID — two months of runway, a family business on the brink. He pulled it through, and the experience shaped everything that followed: build quality at every step, stay close to home, treat the customer like an adult. The flagship on Broadway Street is a beautifully restored 1800s church that was once a flower shop, then a daycare. The downtown location on Miller Ave makes the brand accessible to anyone walking Main Street. Flower starts in DeTour Village in the Upper Peninsula, comes to Ann Arbor for trimming, packaging, and pressing — and lands on the shelf the kind of fresh you can smell. Education-based selling. Staff who grew up here. The Ann Arbor dispensary that most embodies what Ann Arbor is.
Ann Arbor Cannabis
Featured Dispensaries
Ann Arbor has more cannabis business licenses than any city in Michigan. These three represent the range of what that depth can mean — the historical first, the faculty-adjacent consultation, and the small-batch house-made alternative.
Exclusive Ann Arbor
FeaturedExclusive was Ann Arbor's — and the State of Michigan's — first licensed medical marijuana dispensary AND first licensed recreational cannabis facility. That's not marketing. That's history. Seven Michigan locations now, lab-tested products across the widest brand selection in the state, and a team that's been doing this longer than almost anyone. When you want the deepest menu in Ann Arbor, you go here.
Arbors Wellness
FeaturedDowntown and adjacent to the University of Michigan's central campus — which makes it the Ann Arbor dispensary most likely to serve a faculty member on the way home. Medical and recreational, personalized consultations, staff that takes the conversation seriously. The kind of place you take your out-of-town sister who's curious but cautious.
Apothecare
FeaturedApothecare makes a lot of their own products — flower, concentrates, edibles. The regulars will tell you Apothecare's house-made flower is among the best in town, and the staff are the kind who remember what you bought last time and check in on how it worked. Small-batch integrity in a category that often forgets what that means.
Ann Arbor has 39 licensed cannabis dispensaries — more than any other Michigan city. See the full Ann Arbor dispensary directory →
Not sure which dispensary is right for what you need today?
Are you a dispensary that wants to be featured? Learn how it works →
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This Week's Brands
Featured Makers
Ann Arbor sophistication is not about chasing the highest THC. It's about understanding what you're buying. These four brands answer four different questions a thoughtful Ann Arbor buyer might ask — local craft, precision wellness, aesthetic integrity, and solventless purity.
Information Entropy
FeaturedAnn Arbor's own brand, made in Michigan. Pheno-hunted, small-batch-pressed, meticulously labeled. Their Mandarin Z live rosin is Detroit Metro Times' pick for the cultivator's best strain. Named releases like Mackinaw Peachez, Project Z, and Rainbow Belts are inventory, not imports. When you shop Information Entropy the brand, you're shopping the most local option possible — and it happens to be genuinely great.
Look For
Metro Times' favorite Information Entropy strain. Sweet mandarin, grapefruit, spice — energizing and euphoric.
Hybrid with a creamy peach-blossom profile. One of the most flavorful rosins they press.
Heavy indica, citrus-and-diesel aroma, deeply relaxing. The end-of-the-day strain.
Premium flower infused with their own bubble hash. A signature expression of the house style.
Mary's Medicinals
FeaturedPrecision dosing. The brand that pioneered the cannabis transdermal patch and built a wellness-forward line most of the rest of Michigan hasn't caught up to. Their Relief 1:1 patch won the 2023 Michigan High Times Cup. For the Ann Arbor buyer who wants function — sleep, pain relief, focus — without recreational effects, Mary's Medicinals is the correct answer.
Look For
2023 Michigan High Times Cup winner. 8–12 hour systemic relief. Cuttable for microdosing.
Sleep-focused cannabinoid delivered gradually through the night. Wake up without grogginess.
CBD:THC:CBG ratio tuned to harmonize the endocannabinoid system. Designed for balance.
Full-spectrum, lemon-lime flavor, precise sublingual dosing. The calm, measured option.
Redbud Roots
FeaturedCraft meets design. The Strain Art Pre-Roll line — 10-packs with illustrated packaging by Michigan artist Carla Schierling, 28 collectable designs — is one of Michigan cannabis's genuinely beautiful objects. But the craft is real beyond the packaging: Michigan OG flower, Fruit Stand vape carts, Hash House gummies. The Ann Arbor buyer who cares how a product looks as much as how it works.
Look For
Collectible packaging illustrated by Carla Schierling. 28 designs total. A gift to yourself.
Strain-specific live resin in expressive fruit-forward profiles. Clean hardware, honest extraction.
Hash-infused gummies — a real step up from distillate edibles. Full-spectrum effect.
The house strain. Classic OG genetics grown with Redbud care. A Michigan flower anchor.
710 Labs
FeaturedThe national benchmark for solventless concentrate. Persy Water Hash and Persy Rosin are the top of the pyramid — what serious connoisseurs measure everything else against. In Ann Arbor, where the buyer often has tried the best of Colorado and California, 710 Labs is the shelf that says Michigan is not playing catch-up.
Look For
90-micron trichome heads, ice-and-water only. Old-world hash perfection.
Single-origin, single-pressing, cold-cured. The rosin pyramid summit.
Full-spectrum live rosin from fresh-frozen flower. Entry to the 710 experience.
True solventless rosin in a cart. The discreet version of the dab.
Est. 1972 · First Saturday of April · High Noon
The Hash Bash
One of the oldest political rallies of any kind in the United States — and the only one that started with a cannabis law loophole and just kept going. The first Hash Bash was held on April 1, 1972. The fifty-fourth was held in 2025. In 2026, the fifty-fifth happens on the first Saturday of April at high noon on the University of Michigan Diag.
Speakers include state representatives, activists, medical cannabis patients, former law enforcement, and — for most of the first fifty years — John Sinclair himself, who passed in 2024 but whose voice is still the spiritual center of the event. Former governors have attended. Gretchen Whitmer has sent video messages. Cannabis is openly consumed. There is music. There is protest energy, still, even now that recreational cannabis is legal in Michigan.
“The Hash Bash is a celebration of the culture that we formed in the late 1960s that was based on love rather than materialism.” — Chuck Ream, Ann Arbor activist
The event happens on the Diag — which is on University of Michigan property, where state, not city, cannabis laws apply. The University has historically allowed the event and the public consumption that comes with it, though technically cannabis use on campus remains illegal. Attendance ranges from a few thousand to over ten thousand depending on weather.
Visit Hash Bash →Photi's Ann Arbor Essay
A note about Zingerman's — and what Ann Arbor taught Michigan about service.
Zingerman's Delicatessen opened on Detroit Street in 1982 with two employees and 1,500 square feet. Today it anchors a small constellation of Ann Arbor food businesses that generate tens of millions of dollars a year, teach hospitality at Harvard Business School, and have inspired several books on service. One of those books, Ari Weinzweig's Zingerman's Guide to Giving Great Service, treats service not as a cost center but as the product itself.
What Zingerman's figured out — and what so much of the rest of American retail still hasn't — is that the thing customers are buying is the way they feel during the transaction. The Reuben is delicious. The cheese counter is stocked. But those aren't the moat. The moat is that when you walk in, someone is genuinely happy you're there. They're going to answer your questions. They're going to offer you a taste before you buy. And if something isn't right, they're going to fix it without making you feel like you're the problem.
Photi was built with that philosophy in mind. Michigan has extraordinary cannabis. What it has been missing is a conversation that makes walking in the door less overwhelming. Photi is not a recommendation engine. Photi is the version of a budtender that takes the conversation seriously — the same way the counter staff at Zingerman's takes the cheese conversation seriously, even with a customer who's never bought cheese before in their life.
Ann Arbor taught Michigan how to serve. Photi is trying to do the same thing for cannabis.
Eat Ann Arbor
The Food You Came For
Zingerman's Delicatessen
422 Detroit St (Kerrytown) · 7am–10pm daily
One of the most famous delicatessens in America — and the single most studied small business in the country. Harvard Business School teaches them. Ari Weinzweig has written books about service that are required reading in hospitality programs. The Reuben is perfect. The cheese counter is a destination. But what you're really buying when you walk in is the feeling that someone cared about every detail. That's the product.
Miss Kim
415 N 5th Ave (Kerrytown Market) · Lunch and dinner Tue–Sun
Chef Ji Hye Kim's modern Korean restaurant inside Kerrytown Market & Shops. James Beard Award nominee. Seasonal menus, deeply considered sourcing, kimchi that she makes herself. The kind of restaurant that makes Ann Arbor feel bigger than it is. Book ahead.
Frita Batidos
117 W Washington St (Downtown) · Lunch and dinner daily
Chef Eve Aronoff's Cuban-inspired burger and shake shop in a converted downtown space. Picnic-table seating, batidos (tropical shakes), fritas (Cuban burgers) with toppings you won't forget. The most fun casual meal in town. Always busy for a reason.
Jolly Pumpkin Café & Brewery
311 S Main St (Downtown) · Lunch and dinner daily
Ann Arbor's destination brewery — sour ales, wood-fired pizzas, a Main Street patio that fills up by 5pm on any warm evening. The Jolly Pumpkin beer program is internationally respected. The food kitchen holds its own alongside it. A Main Street institution.
While You're Here
Ann Arbor Worth Seeing
University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA)
525 S State St
Free. 20,000+ works across Western, Asian, African, and contemporary collections. The Frank Gehry-designed wing added in 2009 is itself worth the visit. Walkable from the Diag, the Michigan Theater, and Zingerman's. Plan 90 minutes minimum.
The contemporary exhibits rotate frequently and are often surprising. Check what's up before you go.
Learn more →Michigan Theater
603 E Liberty St
Opened in 1928 as a movie palace, saved from demolition by a community effort in the 1970s, now one of the most beloved non-profit cinemas in America. Pre-show live organ music on select nights. First-run independent film, revivals, the Ann Arbor Film Festival. The kind of movie theater that reminds you why seeing films on a big screen matters.
Check the calendar before you come — Ann Arbor Film Festival in March is an Ann Arbor pilgrimage.
Learn more →Literati Bookstore
124 E Washington St
An independent bookstore that became an Ann Arbor institution within a few years of opening. Three floors of carefully curated titles. A café on the top floor. A typewriter in the store where visitors leave anonymous messages (the messages became a book). The kind of bookstore where you meant to stop in for ten minutes and lost an hour.
The typewriter is on the top floor. Leave something. The staff picks shelf is the best in the Midwest.
Learn more →Gallup Park & the Huron River
Ann Arbor's backyard. Canoe and kayak rentals, paved trails, a footbridge over the Huron, riverside picnics. In fall the color along the water is extraordinary. Thirty minutes here and you remember why people move to Ann Arbor.
Rent a canoe and paddle upstream toward Argo Cascades — it's a 2-hour loop and one of the best ways to spend an Ann Arbor afternoon.
Learn more →Nichols Arboretum ("The Arb")
1610 Washington Heights
123 acres of rolling hills, forests, the Huron River, and the University of Michigan's peony garden (nation's largest). Students call it The Arb. Locals picnic here, propose here, grieve here. Completely free, completely essential. Especially in October.
Peony Garden peaks late May to early June. If you're in town then, plan around it.
Learn more →Kerrytown
N 5th Ave & Kingsley
Ann Arbor's market district. Farmer's Market on Saturdays (year-round) and Wednesdays (seasonal). Zingerman's, Miss Kim, and independent shops and galleries in every direction. This is where Ann Arbor feels most like itself on a weekend morning.
Saturday Farmer's Market is genuinely one of the best in the Midwest. Arrive by 10am.
Learn more →Saturday in September
The Big House on game day.
Michigan Stadium holds 107,601 people — the largest college football stadium in the United States. On a home football Saturday, Ann Arbor's population effectively doubles. Tailgates start at dawn. Route 94 and M-14 back up hours before kickoff. Hotels within a thirty-mile radius sell out a year in advance for night games against Ohio State.
If you're in Ann Arbor on a home game Saturday, you have two options: embrace it fully — go to the tailgates, wear maize, walk the crowd down Main Street — or retreat early to one of the quieter neighborhoods like Burns Park or west of downtown. The one thing you cannot do is ignore it. Game day is Ann Arbor at peak volume.
Michigan Football Schedule →
Ready to shop Ann Arbor like an Ann Arbor resident?
The right product for a Saturday at Zingerman's. The right microdose for a lecture you actually want to be awake for. The right flower before a slow afternoon at the Arb. Photi gets to what you need and points you at the right menu.
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